


Apple Pie Morning

by carter



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Thor (Movies)
Genre: :), Fluff, One Shot, also disney, probably, there will be pie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-09
Updated: 2014-12-09
Packaged: 2018-02-28 18:10:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2742104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carter/pseuds/carter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time they met. Apple Pie, insomnia, and The Lion King = early morning fun times. Just some fluffy fluffiness between the Winter Soldier and our favorite Sassmaster.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Apple Pie Morning

The very first time he saw Darcy Lewis, she was a curious stranger clanking around in their kitchen. Music sung by an artist he'd never heard before was blaring from all corners of the room, almost loud enough to drown out the sounds of clinking cups and bowls, and more than enough to silence his entrance. She was a small but curvy young thing with long dark curls pinned up to the top of her head to keep from falling in her face as she worked.

A red and white spotted apron was tied around her waist, but it didn't shield her from the splotches of flour dusting all over her clothes. She was dancing, quite adamantly, in the way that you'd only ever dance while alone and listening to a favorite song. He smirked while he watched her, hips swinging, hands moving about, and her voice only barely audible but still very clear to be heard at the top of her lungs. It was something like walking in on Stark in his workshop, only perhaps louder, if that was even possible. Eventually she spotted him, arms crossed and leaning into the doorframe as a silent audience, and he was given a bright, red lipsticked smile. She waved to him and made a tilting motion with her head, inviting him in, like they were long time pals. She didn't even seem embarrassed to be caught dancing so freely, unlike the way he knew he probably would have been. So he stepped forward, keeping a wide berth as his eyes never left her, and took a seat at the island countertop.

She was baking something, rolling out a ball of dough on the flour dusted counter. She threw her head back and seemed to laugh at the loud music, shouting something over the noise. "JARVIS!"

The sound quieted down bit by bit until it was merely a dull roar and she was smiling again. "Thank you, Jarvis," she said kindly, and the Tower AI responded with a robotic yet somehow endearingly sounding, "You are quite welcome, Darcy."

So that was her name. He wasn't sure he'd ever seen her around Stark's tower yet, granted he'd only been resident for maybe a week or so now. And yet, he was certain she wasn't a face he'd too soon forget. She had bright blue eyes shining behind the chunky black frames of her glasses. They were odd to him, not something he normally found attractive on a woman, those glasses. He'd found the very small number of female scientists or assistants at Stark Tower to wear them quite awkwardly, making their faces look pinched and narrow, but he wasn't quite sure what to make of them settled on her pretty face. It may have been the first time he found that they may have looked rather...nice, perhaps.

"So what's your name then?" She asked him, and he blinked, furrowed his brow, because of course he'd been staring at her _damn glasses_ of all things.

"It's, ah, James," he told her. "But, most guys would call me Bucky."

"Mm-hm, well, Bucky, do you like apples?"

"Uh, sure?"

She smiled. "Great!" And handed him a bowl filled with a dozen large, green apples and a peeler. "It's you're own fault for walking in, Buck," she informed him with a shrug as she turned back to her dough, a smirk curving her red lips. Her eyes glanced back up to him once, then back down again. "Now you get to do some work."

His eyebrows flicked up with a small, amused smile, but she was already working steadfastedly on the ball of dough. With nothing else to say or do, Bucky picked up the peeler and a single apple as he went to work. When all the fruit was successfully peeled, she gave him a satisfied nod. He watched her pick up a knife and begin to make thinly sliced cuts into each apple she held, dropping small wedges into the large bowl as she went. Her head tilted back and forth in time with her music, still playing at a reasonably loud volume over the speakers. After the first apple was finished, he found a second knife and joined her. Whatever it was he had come in to do that night was now long forgotten.

Then he remembered it was one in the morning and turned to look at her as the last piece of fruit fell into the bowl.

"What are you doing up so late making apple pies?"

"Not late," she corrected. "Early."

"Well, early then?"

She shrugged and scooped up the bowl with its dozen apples worth of slices. "Needed something to do."

She didn't ask why he had been walking around the tower at 1AM, or why he had stopped and found her in the kitchens, or why he had stayed (though with a group like the Avengers, there were certainly more than one or two insomniacs roaming around). She hadn't asked him to share a single thing other than his name and he found that that was all very okay at that hour of the morning, night, whatever you wanted to call it.

He suppossed he wasn't really showing her the same courtesy when he asked, "And the music?"

But she smiled and he knew it was a question deemed more than alright. "Jarvis assured me I was 'well out of hearing range from all sleeping occupants'. Big tower, thick walls and all that."

He nodded and rolled a stray piece of dough between his fingertips. He looked up and his mouth began to water at that damn near heavenly smell of cinnamon sugar, lemon, and apple being tossed together, his thoughts immediately launching to that Sunday morning smell he used to wake up to once every week as the smell of baked goods wafted all the way up to his window from that little Brooklyn bakery back home. Still it was so strange in his mind that the very same place was only a few miles from where he was now, though he dared not learn what lay there now. Nothing good, nothing that would have stayed the same.

So instead he forced himself back to the present, (seventy years later, he had to keep reminding himself, though it was becoming less and less hard), and watched her spoon all the bowl's contents into three separate pie dishes, already laced with sheets of dough. When they were topped and sent into the oven, she began scrubbing at the counters, and again he helped her, getting up to collect the used dishes.

She gave him a smirk, maybe a look of surprise, but her eyes were soft. "Aren't you the gentleman," she said, and though it gave him a small kind of pride at recieving her praise, he hated that there was some chance that somewhere, at some point, there had been however many people without the courtesy to treat her as well. Maybe there still was. He could add that to the list of things bound to keep his thoughts restlessly awake at night.

"Do you always bake when you 'need something to do'?" He tossed her one of the very few smiles he'd given since arriving with Steve at the tower. "Not that I'm complaining, those things smell damn near sinful."

Her laugh was light and the most genuine he'd heard in God only knew how long. "I guess it's just one of those things," she said. "Something to do when I need to think. Or when I'm thinking too much. You have something like that?"

"Yes, Ma'am," he replied. "It's called Cheap Liquor." He could see her smirking from the corner of his eye. She walked closer and took the stack of bowls he held into her hands, taking them to the sink and beginning to wash them out. He opened the fridge and asked if she'd like a drink. She told him it was nearing 2AM and he cracked a bottle open in reply.

"Don't call me 'Ma'am'," she told him. "I don't even let Jarvis call me anything but Darcy, and the same goes for you and the Star Spangled Man as well. You talk a bit like him.

"Well, everything's clean and I've only managed to kill about ten minutes with your help. You a Disney fan, Bucky?"

"Disney?" He tried to remember. "I saw a movie by him, once. About an elephant? Er, a flying elephant?" 

She smiled and nodded. "Gotta love Dumbo, it's a classic. C'mon, I think I've got the Lion King somewhere around here."

He kept one hand circled around the neck of his bottle at the kitchen counter as she moved to the spacious living room area, soon opening cabinets and locating the DVD and video player. This one entire floor acted as a kind of common area for the team's members and small number of friends. He could only assume Darcy was one of those few; she seemed to know where and what everything was and comfortable using the space. And yet he was meeting her for the first time by chance in the early hours because neither of them could get any sleep that night.

"Are you gonna watch, or do you have something against _incredibly beautiful_ works of animation?"

About halfway through the movie, a timer went off and Darcy had just enough state of mind left within her to groggily get up from the couch, put on a pair of oven mitts, and pull the three pies from the oven before turning it off. Stumbling back to the living area, she tiredly fell back onto the soft and warm sofa cushions, mitts and apron and all. Bucky, near fully sleep, groggily shifted over her on the same couch, winding two arms around her waist and pulling her to his chest securely.

And because they had all the luck in the world, it was Tony Stark who found them first, hours later.

The animated picture of the Disney castle over a moonlit lake was playing at full loop because no one had turned off the movie player, and the large window panes had been shaded to keep the morning light from waking them (courtesy of Jarvis).

Stark had been in his workshop, as he always was around six in the morning, and was brought upstairs by the sudden and distinct smell of cinnamon apple pie. Specifically, he knew, _Darcy's_ apple pie. So of course, like a kid on Christmas morning, he hadn't bothered to hide his excitement as he took the stairs from the workshop two at a time to the common room floors where the smell drifted heavily through the halls. He wasn't disappointed when he found three beautifully Darcy-crafted pies sitting cooled over the stove. Jarvis was already brewing a strong new pot of coffee and Tony's morning was suddenly looking so much better.

He was just picking up a large plate and a larger cutting knife when he stopped, frozen, at the shifting sound of blankets and the soft moans of someone on the couch. A brow was raised and Tony carefully looked to the cinnamon dusted crust and back to the large sofa, noticing for the first time the Disney display on his flatscreen. Picking the entire pie dish up into one hand and bearing down into it with a massivly sized fork (normally reserved for the likes of Thor), he strolled over to peer over the couch at a bulky figure rustling beneath a large blanket. He became interested when he not only spied the familiarly thick black glasses tossed upon the coffee table, but an even more familair metal plated arm slipping beneath the blanket to loll over the edge of the cushions, TV romote clutched in one robotic hand.

A smirk settled over Stark's features as he waited in amusement for this little scene to play out—and having a pie to go with! Shoveling another heaping forkful into his mouth, he watched as Darcy's dark, pillow ruffled head of hair poked from beneath the covers, her arms soon following to stretch above herself, yawning. Her eyes flicked up toward Stark and she froze stiff for all of two seconds before whipping her head back to look at the big and bulky 'pillow' she'd fallen asleep on, one that still had a strong arm gripped around her waist tightly.

Her eyes immediately narrowed at Stark, (as if it were _his_ fault, somehow or in some way), daring him to make a sound or to wake the still sleeping soldier. She gently tried to untangle her legs with his and carefully leaned forward to begin slipping from his hold, but as she inched further and further away, in the end it added up to nothing as Bucky shifted in his sleep, pulling her tighter to his chest and replacing the entirety of her body where it had been in a single, subconscious movement.

Stark snorted and Darcy promptly flipped him off. He smiled and shoveled in another bite of pie.

It was at that moment that Clint came bursting through the doors, barely noticing his company as he dove straight for the remaining two pies that he had woken up to the intoxicating scent of that morning. Taking her own time, Natasha came strolling along not too long after. As Clint went clanking around the kitchen drawers for a plate and fork, Natasha raised a brow at the smiling Stark and Darcy's ruffled hair peeking over the top of the sofa.

"Would somebody _please_ help me?" Darcy whispered pleadingly as loud as she dared. The last thing she wanted was for Bucky to wake up and become embarrassed of her after they had just started to become friendly the night before.

Stark, always one to enjoy the embarrassment of others, was more than happy to open his pie filled mouth and came very close to loudly exposing her before Natasha came up from behind, very casually stuffing a napkin in his open piehole. Stark choked and Natasha payed little mind as she looked down skeptically at Darcy and their newest team mate Bucky together.

Decidedly plotting to get the details from Darcy later, Natasha set about helping her out of the situation at hand. It was evident that Darcy didn't want Barnes to wake up, least of all with this newly growing audience.

"Jarvis."

"Yes, Ms. Romanoff?"

"Black us out," she said, carrying all the command and presence as if she were running any other high end misson or assignment. The AI complied, and all lights to the room were cut off, leaving them in complete darkness. A fork clattered to the ground and Clint cursed before the only sounds in the pitch black of the room were the shuffling of sheets and a soft grumble as Bucky began to stir. Natasha ushered Darcy to the door quickly ("How the hell did you do that?") before dashing back and dragging Stark and Barton out with her.

The door opened and closed in a matter of seconds, leaving only a flash of light behind to wake Bucky up competely. When he sat himself up straight on the couch, the lights came up slowly and, looking blearily about the room, he found himself alone and with two out of Darcy's three pies missing.


End file.
